Radosh.net

Herzberg and Colbert in one week? Nice blitz.

You know, it's actually safe because when you're playing you keep a cup of water handy to cleanse the ball. Also, we all know about the sanitizing properties of alcohol.

Don't get me wrong, I'm impressed, but it's nothing to retire over.

Here, free material.

Your scoop? Jesus you think a lot of yourself. Comments on the original article and original digg had figured it out soon after reading it, even if they missed the joke while reading. Radio stations in San Diego and elsewhere were in contact with the original authors months before the hack journalism at Fox and elsewhere took it as gospel. The NBC story was corrected by ASU itself and they issued a correction less than a day later. The original article itself shows up on a google search before this site does. I'm pretty sure Colbert's team just did a google search and figured it out for themselves in under ten minutes.

You were not only late to the party, you didn't even bring a gift.

Usually when I say something like "my scoop" it's a joke, but this time, no I really did have a scoop. I never claimed that I was the first person to notice that original story on the humor site was satire. I assume most people noticed that, no matter how poor the satire was. My scoop was that Fox News, the NBC affiliate and various college papers *hadn't* noticed and had credulously run variations on the story. So anything that may have been said on the radio or elsewhere months before all that doesn't interest me.

Contrary to your claim, the NBC site took a few days to run a correction, but even if they learned of their mistake independently of my post, that's also irrelevant. (BTW, their correction is shamefully misleading itself; it says a single quote was a fabrication, not that the entire story was bogus).

So what I'm actually taking credit for is sparking the trail that got the Fox-fucked-up story onto Colbert.

Here's your version of events. Colbert's writers happen to see the same Fox story I did, and happen to do the same thing I did: Google, send a few e-mails. Not much in the way of reporting, but still more than comedy writers usually do. In the realm of possibility, I guess. Oh, and they take a week to get around to it.

Here's my version. I post this story and nothing happens for several days until Andrew Sullivan links to it. *He's* the one I think a lot of, or at least his traffic. Within hours, the item is on dozens of blogs and media web sites of the kind that Colbert's writers read religiously. And a day after that, it's on Colbert.

And speaking of late to the party, all this happened two weeks ago.